Nintendo Switch owners should be jealous of the Wii U’s new game this week – Polygon

This week’s set of Nintendo eShop downloads are pretty paltry across the board, but there’s one highlight in the lineup — for Wii U, anyway.

The Wii version of Pikmin 2is now available on Wii U Virtual Console, and it has added off-screen play support. At $19.99, that’s a steal for a copy of this classic, which became scarce not long after its initial release on GameCube.

Nintendo ported Pikmin 2 over to Wii as part of its “New Play Control” lineup, adding motion controls to the mix, in 2012, three years after Pikmin got the same treatment. It later was included in the Nintendo Selects line of budget-priced games, but even that version is incredibly expensive nowadays. Amazon Prime has new copies for $79, while resellers want anywhere from $10 to $95 for them.

There’s still a huge caveat lingering over all Wii U digital games, though. There’s no way to port Wii U purchases over to Nintendo Switch yet, so eShop games and Virtual Console titles are locked on the older hardware for now. The Switch doesn’t have a Virtual Console yet, and it’s not clear when it will have one, let alone whether it will be backward compatible with games released on Wii U and older.

What is on the Switch eShop today also harkens back to a bygone era of gaming. SNK’s Metal Slug is now on Switch for $7.99, filling out the Switch’s already robust catalogue of classic action games. As Nintendo’s eShop description says, Metal Slug is a masterpiece of gaming, but Switch owners who abandoned their Wii U consoles last month may still feel a twinge of envy today.